Forum for Science, Industry and Business

New Research to Explore Impacts of Stereotyping

05.07.2004

Toni Schmader, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has won a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to explore how awareness of negative stereotypes impacts the cognitive functions of women and Latinos.

At issue is whether exposure to a negative stereotype can affect cognitive function. Social psychologists have recently discovered that women and racial or ethnic minorities often perform more poorly on academic tests when exposed to negative stereotypes about their group, such as "women and Latinos arent expected to do well on math and science tests."

The phenomenon is called "stereotype threat," and while the implications are far-reaching, scientists are trying to understand how it works.

Schmader and her team will use the four-year, $400,000 grant to examine the precise nature of the cognitive deficits that some people experience when they are presented with negative stereotypes about their abilities.

The project evolved from initial research by Schmader and Mike Johns, a UA psychology graduate student. Their earlier research demonstrated that women and Latinos showed a decreased ability to focus attention on a task when they believed that their math ability or intelligence was being assessed on the basis of their gender or race.

A new series of experiments will test what psychological and physiological processes account for these cognitive impairments.

Schmader thinks one possibility is that thoughts of the negative stereotype elicit a physiological stress response that is interpreted by the individual as an indicator of poor performance. The person might then expend some cognitive resources trying to regulate feelings of anxiety and self-doubt.

A significant impact of the research is that by better understanding the stress-related processes that are affected by stereotype threat, it may be possible to develop strategies to help affected groups successfully cope with social stigma.

Die letzten 5 Focus-News des innovations-reports im Überblick:

A new assessment of NASA's record of global temperatures revealed that the agency's estimate of Earth's long-term temperature rise in recent decades is accurate to within less than a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, providing confidence that past and future research is correctly capturing rising surface temperatures.

The most complete assessment ever of statistical uncertainty within the GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP) data product shows that the annual values...

Physicists at the University of Basel are able to show for the first time how a single electron looks in an artificial atom. A newly developed method enables them to show the probability of an electron being present in a space. This allows improved control of electron spins, which could serve as the smallest information unit in a future quantum computer. The experiments were published in Physical Review Letters and the related theory in Physical Review B.

The spin of an electron is a promising candidate for use as the smallest information unit (qubit) of a quantum computer. Controlling and switching this spin or...

With a quantum coprocessor in the cloud, physicists from Innsbruck, Austria, open the door to the simulation of previously unsolvable problems in chemistry, materials research or high-energy physics. The research groups led by Rainer Blatt and Peter Zoller report in the journal Nature how they simulated particle physics phenomena on 20 quantum bits and how the quantum simulator self-verified the result for the first time.

Many scientists are currently working on investigating how quantum advantage can be exploited on hardware already available today. Three years ago, physicists...

'Quantum technologies' utilise the unique phenomena of quantum superposition and entanglement to encode and process information, with potentially profound benefits to a wide range of information technologies from communications to sensing and computing.

However a major challenge in developing these technologies is that the quantum phenomena are very fragile, and only a handful of physical systems have been...